In January, we diet. That’s the sense you’ll get if you talk to the average person on the street. We overindulged at Christmas, but that’s long over, now we sit in the drab darkness trying to force ourselves to eat healthy things, go to the gym, or pound the pavement in the lashing rain.
The story we’re told is: feasting is fun, but you have to pay for it afterwards.
We assume that ‘fasting,’ though we wouldn’t use that language for it, is the thing you do after you fast.
The Christian tradition assumes the opposite. Advent is a fast. Lent is a fast. The thing they have in common? They’re before the feasts. Christian fasting has nothing to do with penance for indulgence, instead it’s about anticipation of delight.
Jesus’ teaching on fasting was that fasting is not something you do at a wedding (Matthew 9) but only when the bridegroom isn’t present. Obvious enough: if you ever meet an overly pious Christian who refuses to eat at a wedding because ‘they’re fasting’ then on my behalf please roll your eyes so hard they fall out of your head. Weddings are a celebration, not a time for fasting.
If anything, this might be the only place that the generally unhealthy diet culture gets it right: the bride dieting to fit into her wedding dress isn’t actually fasting, but at least she’s doing things the right way around. Her dieting is anticipatory.
When Jesus told us not to fast when the bridegroom was present, he was instructing his disciples that of course they didn’t fast while he was around, but there would come an in between time when they would fast. The wedding analogy helps us see that this fasting is itself anticipatory: the wedding wasn’t when Jesus was sitting and talking with his disciples, the wedding comes at the end of history when he marries the church. Fasting precedes feasting.
There’s a principle here for the Christian life, I think.
Feasting is a good thing. Overindulgence might be bad (Proverbs 23), but to feast is not to eat until you are as wide as you are tall, it’s to deliberately use food, drink, and friendship to celebrate something. Feasting is elevated eating in pursuit of delight rather than expansive eating in pursuit of dissipation. In this sense, at least, feasting is downstream of the Lord’s Supper, which teaches us that fancy food is not the chief requirement of a feast. It is good to take the gifts of the earth and enjoy them before the Lord.
Fasting is also a good thing. Abstaining from good things in order to cultivate particular affections towards God is a Christian habit. We should notice that fasting isn’t abstaining from bad things. Most modern Lenten practice involves giving up a bad habit, that’s not fasting, its repentance. Abstaining from something of ambiguous worth with a morally corrosive edge, like social media, could be a good idea but is right at the edge of the broadest definition of fasting. Fasting in the Bible is always abstaining from food or particular foods, but even its widest application is going to be centred on choosing to give up the good for a time in order cultivate a particular attitude or affection. Typically, that affection is desire, or to put it most simply, hunger. We chose to hunger in order to hunger for God.
The Christian life has this wider dynamic, we either abstain from something good in order to cultivate good affections that point us towards the Lord, or we enjoy something good in order to thank the Lord for the gift of his good creation. Good, created things can be responded to in both ways and are best responded to in a cyclical pattern that takes in both feasting and fasting.
This means that when someone else is enjoying or abstaining we should not judge them for it if we are doing the opposite. There is a cyclical nature to these things. ‘No good Christian would enjoy ___’ is not a sentence that should be completed with any good gift of the earth. There is therefore no food or drink which cannot be enjoyed in a way that ultimately thanks God for its gift. Of course there are things, especially particular kinds of media created by sinful humans, which it is impossible for a Christian to enjoy in a way that cultivates gratitude, but the general principle as pertains to creation is important.
Complete abstinence from good things is therefore half of the Christian story: whatever goods there are in quasi-monastic lifestyles are, in my opinion, undermined if they don’t also include belly laughs and the enjoyment of good things. Fasting is not, fundamentally, abstinence, but the active cultivation of delight in God rather than good things.
Complete indulgence in good things is also half of the Christian story: grace is not meant to lead to libertines, neither is it meant to lead to aesthetes or gluttons who cultivate a love of good gifts from God until they are controlled by them. Feasting is not, fundamentally, indulgence but active cultivation of delight in good things for the sake of God alone.
Fasting and feasting as a dynamic of the Christian life are designed to aid us to rightly order our loves so that we love God and we love good things for the sake of God.
Photo by Luisa Brimble on Unsplash
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